I know my power. I know the way I shift the energy of any room I enter. The heat and light that comes off of me. I know it. Look at me. The command of my height, the spread of my shoulders, I stand with strength. I am immortal. See the swell and lift of my breasts, nipples that press against the saffron robe that drapes my body like it was painted on my flesh. Do you see? Not just beautiful. Powerful. The sweeping rise of my throat, the warmth and ferocity of my mouth, the wide bones of my skull, the swell and lift of my cheeks, skin the color of coconut flesh. Blond-white hair that sweeps like a cresting wave above my forehead, my cheeks flushed, and my eyes hold every moonrise and the spark and current of every ounce of menstrual blood released from all the women who bleed.
I am for the women. Don’t you see?
But there are so many and they are so new and they are so tempting for my Jove, my beloved, who cannot resist young women, who cannot resist the nymphs. Like Semele, a child really, with her black hair that fell straight around her jaw, her big young sad-dumb eyes, her open trusting smile. She had no idea the bad-news situation she’d found herself in. And if it had just been some simple one-time lay, fine, forgive, forget, but she got pregnant, he made her pregnant, and to see her aglow, belly swelling, his immortal seed growing inside her mortal body, I could not have it. Her? Not me? Why? The answers my brain offers are a catalogue of my own failings. Have I gone stale? Is he no longer attracted to my body, tall and lean? Has familiarity fogged his ability to see me—am I invisible to him, across the breakfast table, in our shared bed? Have I disappeared? Am I not funny? Am I too powerful? Is my hair too blond? Too short? Would it be better if I had longer hair? Has the shared bone that is the marriage bond grown brittle over this long spread of time? Am I too much a given? What is wrong with me?
So, I disguised myself as Semele’s old nurse and we chatted about this and that, and I slipped in, “My dear, so young, perhaps you do not know the ways of men—so many of them deceive you! If you want to know if the man who visits your bed is Jove himself, you’ve got to ask him to prove it to you. Ask him to show himself to you the way he shows himself to Juno. It’s the only way you’ll know.”
One cannot see the true face of a god and live. I knew this meant her death. And so it did. Is it fair that she’s a heap of ash, gritty with bits of her bones? Of course it’s not. But what am I supposed to do with the anger? I share my life with him. Are these women to blame? It’s not a question I can spend my time answering. Punishing them, watching them die, it’s one way to let out the anger. But it brings me no relief. One gone, he finds another. And it happens again, again, again. These poor women. But this poor me. Someone has to pay. I watched Semele burn. It brought me no relief.
And Echo, too, you have to understand, one cannot deceive a goddess and expect life to go on as normal. I’d know Jove was down carousing, getting handsy with the nymphs, and I couldn’t help but follow, even though I knew I was following a path that led directly toward more pain. And Echo, who never lay with Jove, who had curly hair and a funny laugh, would come and talk with me. I admit: I enjoyed her conversation. She’d tell me about the gossip of the woods, the mischief of the satyrs, the parties, and she’d laugh her funny laugh and look around, and I thought maybe it was nerves, from talking to me. But it was not that.
She was playing me for a fool, talking in my ear not because she liked me but so her nymphette friends would have time enough to scatter, to not get caught with my Jove’s wide palm groping at their breasts.
There is no one on my team.
So I took away her talk. All she can do is repeat the words that others say. And when I watched her fall for Narcissus, that self-loving twit, drowning in the depths of his own empty reflection, it did not make me happy. It brought me no relief. I watched her chase him, throw her voice his way every time he spoke. I watched her life force drain out of her as she retreated to a cave, rejected, alone, from body to bone to stone at the floor of a cave and her sad voice bouncing off the hills. This is one form the crushing of love can take. Mine takes another. I take revenge the way I can. I could no more murder my immortal husband than carve a hole into the sky. And I understand him. He cannot resist fresh adoration, needs attention. I know he is weak and his weakness makes me tender and it makes me so angry I can barely see.
My Jove. My love, my husband, my brother, my king, my thunderer, oh my lightning bolt, my wild mighty god, you own me, I am yours, my golden-shafted swan, my wooly bull, my broad-backed lamb (you know you are), I take your eagle in my mouth, I know you like it, oh my animal, you who share my blood, my bed, my life, eternally. Give me your thunderbolt, all of it, into every part of me, my Jove, my love, my horny fucking husband, my hungerer, my betrayer, my endless source of sorrow and rage, my bottomless well of pain, my pathetic useless liar.